Google says it's opening a privacy focused engineering center in Munich, Germany, in its latest move to beef up its data protection credentials.

CEO Sundar Pichai said Tuesday that the Silicon Valley tech giant is expanding its operations in the southern German city and plans to double the number of privacy engineers there to more than 200 by the end of 2019.

Pichai said in a blog post that the new Google Safety Engineering Center will make Munich a global hub for the company's "cross-product privacy engineering efforts."

The company unveiled new privacy tools this month that people can use to gain more control over how they're being tracked, part of a broader effort by big tech companies to counter increasing scrutiny of their data collection practices.

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Apple's iPhones and iPads have gotten free software updates, including battery improvements and a smarter virtual assistant. The new features and capabilities in the update, iOS 9, are primarily refinements rather than anything transformative.